Dirk Braeckman is this year's Belgian Representative at the 57th Venice Biennale. Together with curator Eva Wittocx, Braeckman's exhibition presents a full oeuvre of work, including new and unique photographs.

It’s easy to lose yourself in the act of looking when you’re in front of an image by Dirk Braeckman. There’s an energy reverberating in the darkness of his photographs that draws you into another dimension – where the eyes simultaneously linger over the surface of the image and orbit around the emerging contours of objects, scenes and bodies that seem to possess lives of their own. For a moment, the allure of these mysterious details offers a much-needed mental detour from the stories we tell ourselves.

Braeckman is representing Belgium at the 57th Venice Biennale with a new series of monumental photographic prints, all of them black and white and on baryta paper. Born in Eeklo, Belgium, the Ghent-based photographer shoots only analogue, and always showcases his images unglazed and uncovered. Without any physical interference, the eye can directly wander along the ridges, fissures and fragments of enigmatic forms, diverting attention from any particular narrative. After all, Braeckman is not interested in crafting narratives, abiding to a specific theme nor capturing reality in his work, the artist is adamant on creating an atmosphere. “I’m not a storyteller, I’m an imagemaker,” he tells AnOther. “The story is made in the mind of the viewer.”

THE WORDEva Wittocx on Dirk Braeckman’s show for the Belgian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennial

"Unlike most photographers, where the centre of the image contains the most important information, Dirk constructs the images from the edges of the composition inwards."

Curator for Dirk Braeckman's exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale Eva Wittocx spoke to Sophie Verhulst about the upcoming extravaganza.

"Eva Wittocx, senior curator at Museum M in Leuven and curator of the show, looks delighted. “The show is turning out great, everything is coming together. We’ve got a few loose ends to tie up but overall, we’re ready.”, she explains. The building of the Belgian pavilion in Venice has been renovated over the winter, new skylights were installed and the rooms received a fresh coat of paint. “We don’t have a specific scenography, so the building needed to be in perfect shape for the focus to be on the work. It’s part of Dirk’s practice to create every exhibition anew, within the environment.”, Eva continues, while mentioning that they sent over quite a large shipment to Venice, one that included more works than they could show. “That way, we were able to explore several options and had the freedom to see what worked in the space and which combinations of works we would eventually show.” Working with neither themes nor series, Eva points out that this exactly why Braeckman’s old and new work seamlessly fit together, that the magic of the show is all in the combinations of autonomous works."